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I have a bunch of keepers from previous photos that I have spent a few hours each tweaking to be right where I want using iphoto and later aperture. I loaded those raw files into dxo, and the "auto" mode looks nearly the same as my hour of tweaks, but the focus and noise is better, and it corected of all of the chromatic aberrations from my years of non L lenses.

Get the 30 day demo, and play with this.

The way they license it as pro version if you have a full frame sensor in your camera, otherwise you don't need the pro version.

I am completely blown away in awe by dxo. The "lens sharpness" feature is outstanding. It brings back texture out of a blurry mess when I am looking at pictures of birds and lizards. I can see the sharp edges of scales on lizards, and the bumps on the eye ridges. Yet it also smooths out bokeh.

One of the most compelling features is that the default settings "auto" everything almost exactly match what I get out of 10 minutes of lightroom or iphoto tweeking. DXO makes photos the way that I saw the scene, not how the camera attempted to capture it.

When I want to tweek the color curves emphasize the texture of the sand under the lake, and the sky overhead while ignoring the dead trees, it has those controls too.

The lizard and bird pictures were shot on a Canon xsi with the 55-250 lens. It is like a $1500 glass upgrade in post production.

You see occasional complaints about depth of field, but you probably don't understand how bad a problem it is. I looked into getting one of these (reflector based telephoto lenses)years ago, and at the time the russian models were available. I don't imagine that this can be much different.

the 500mm lens had a depth of field of 1 inch at a distance of 1/4 mile at F11. focusing required a tripod. Maybe that is desirable, you would have crazy bokeh, but the bokeh is all donuts not circles.

So given the problems with the depth of field, you need lots of rotation on the focusing grip, or a usm motor, a stepper motor is not precise enough.